The circle of life is a well-documented, widely disputed beast. It is common knowledge that, from the movement of life, there originates death. Conversely, from the ruins of death, there will always grow life. Long has mankind held power over death; to cause it, to stymie it, to hold it at bay and bring it to bear. Life, on the other hand, belongs firmly in the grasp of nature.

Under the harsh glow of three fluorescent panels a folder of case files lay haphazardly flung upon the bunk of Marcus Beckett. Accompanied only by a drained coffee cup and two used tissues, the files held no immediate significance to anyone and, over the course of months, had simply become part of the landscape. His utilitarian pillow, a plain foam pad encased in sterile white, lay partially exposed from its pillowcase upon the floor. His blanket, an irreversible fleece coated along its upper side with clear, flexible plastic, had fallen unsung between the bunk and the wall. It was a static scene that struck a sharp contrast against the manner of its owner.

Curiously, not one of the five academics sharing those particular quarters seemed affronted by this apparent negligence. Under typical circumstances, such sloth would have swiftly earned a write-up at the very least, possibly even a permanent order demerit that would vastly affect his salary and rank, among other things. Instead, the imperfect condition of Dr. Beckett's sleeping area only promoted admiration amongst his coworkers and superiors. No factory-produced doctor would give up his bedding to sleep upon the cold tile floor of a laboratory for a week, even when the project held such history-altering consequences as did his. His dedication to the craft was practically legendary amongst his peers, despite its limited effects upon his salary.

The ninth day of the month of May happened upon a Sunday in the year 2010. Cool, crisp weather dominated that particular morning, as was expected year-round this far into Romania's northern regions. Tucked away within an unimpressive subdivision of the great Carpathian Mountains, the squat hull of the Dzugashvili Institution felt little of the comfortable winds or glimmering sunlight that made for such a pleasant day outside. It hardly mattered. Not a soul in the place could have spared even a passing moment to admire its alpine majesty anyway. Those who had not been literally dragged from Sunday Mass had even neglected to put away their playing cards, chess boards, novels, and magazines in their collective rush. Researchers, doctors, and even the maintenance crew and custodians buzzed within the labyrinthine halls of the Institution. Business, that fateful May morning, was to be monumental.

"What's the situation in here, Johan? The Doppelganger isn't ready yet, so please tell me that the girl is stable." Doctor Marcus Beckett, half an English muffin still in hand, tread those halls with a purposeful step that day. Aroused from his first late sleep in seven days, he no more looked the part of a brilliant scientist than that of a ballerina. Strands of hair haloed about his head in an unkempt aura of sienna, framing a mellow face dominated by worn-out eyes of a similar tone. The t-shirt and jeans, though, had nothing to do with his late night and long morning. A lab coat, he had always said, promoted impersonality between doctors and patients.

That, and he hated the color white.

"She is better than we could have expected. The father has encouraged her exercise and apparently spared no expense on her treatments," Johan, his honey blonde coworker, answered in a cheerful tone. "Still, she is nineteen years old..."

"Don't bother me with pessimism, Johan. Save it for the case files, and get me some gum." Marcus playfully slapped Johan upon his slightly pudgy arm as they rounded the final corner preceding the helipad entrance. "Relax! God, but you Swedes are so uptight."

"Yes, and Americans are such mellow dogs," Johan chuckled wryly in answer.

From the access ramp of the Institution's small helipad Marcus enjoyed an uninterrupted view of the descending medical 'copter, a dingy craft plastered with Cyrillic characters of absolutely no meaning to him. Not that being American instantly relegated him to anilingual status; he was just, as he found great amusement in declaring, untrained in Eurasia-speak. Darkly-dressed landing crews scurried like perturbed ants with their colorful flags and batons waving all about, guiding the pilot as well as they could manage without the aid of radio contact. It was a concrete jungle set into the tree line; Marcus certainly did not envy the pilot's job.

Someone - Marcus could not tell who - thrust a cup of coffee into his free hand in passing. He allowed himself to concentrate upon its bitter heat until the chuffing bird touched down, and maintained his vigil just long enough to see the wheelchair ramp rolled into its proper position before turning and striding back into laboratory six to give the Doppelganger its daily maintenance examination. Today, after all, would top the chart of worst possible days for that bug-ridden jalopy to break down.

Her optimism came as a surprise to Marcus. Eleven years of his life he had spent at one rank or another in various American hospitals, dealing almost exclusively with physical and occupational therapy programs around the nation. Automobile accidents, sports medicine, household injuries, degenerative diseases... all had fallen beneath his medical banner at one time or another. He had seen people suffering from nothing more serious than twisted ankles lament their bitter fortune, had bitten his tongue as a dozen arthritics smiled bitter smiles while they drew into their antipathic shells and awaited Fate's messenger. Though the affliction plaguing this young woman - the passenger who had arrived via helicopter that morning - would inevitably quarter her expected lifespan, she never seemed to go a moment without a smile settled upon her little face. Within hours of her arrival at the Dzugashvili Institution she had attained the admiration of every last person to come into contact with her; from the sarcastic old helicopter pilot to her assigned physicians, her lab tech, and even the janitor scrubbing outside of her ward, the lonely teenager, crippled by muscular dystrophy, had won them all with that infectious smile.

Doctor Marcus Beckett's first meeting with Sashenka occurred at seven o' clock, on Wednesday, the ninth evening of May. He stood outside her door for a solid five minutes, rifling through the various agreements and charts contained within his ever-present black binder, asking a thousand questions of himself and entertaining the notion of simply pulling the plug on this entire project. Instead, he gulped a few nervous breaths, savoring the flavor of his rampant trepidation, and pushed his way into room one-oh-four.

"Sashenka Petrova, right?" The doctor stepped quietly into the nicely furnished ward, admiring as ever the unnecessarily upscale decor inhabiting these patient wards. A sturdy umber futon imported from Germany lay against the far wall, its color clashing fashionably with the pleasant-smelling wood of the building's architecture, while a cluster of bookshelves and a movie-rack dominated the rest of the wall space. Subtitled cartoons flickered upon the television screen, their exaggerated audio joined now and again by the tinkling laughter of the raven-haired young lady watching them. Marcus made use of her distraction to allow himself a moment of observation; her appearance displayed many of the obvious distortions suffered by those with her particular ailment, but still she rode a fine line equidistant from both 'plain' and 'pretty'. The deep, attentive blue of her eyes, however, seemed to miss nothing and more than compensated for her lack of socially accepted beauty.

"Yes, that is right," she finally answered in her heavily accented English, her voice the trill of a flute at the worst. Those searching ceruleans locked upon Marcus as he entered and shut the door, analyzing him as eagerly as he had analyzed her. For his part he fought to hold her gaze, if for no other reason than to keep himself from gazing upon her wheelchair, her painfully atrophied legs, or her compact breathing apparatus... as often as he had seen muscular dystrophy patients in their element, maintaining his etiquette towards them had persistently failed to be easy.

"Hi," Marcus smiled as he greeted her, extending his arm for a handshake. "My name's Doctor Marcus Beckett, but just call me Marcus. I don't care for the 'doctor' unless I'm supposed to look intelligent. I'm your pseudoxenotherapist this evening."

Sashenka smiled a curious little smile, her grip surprisingly sure upon his hand. "I am sorry, I do not understand the word. I have already met my physical therapist today." Marcus nodded, grinning to himself. His jeans and baseball jersey, it seemed, lent him little credibility.

"Yeah, that's Yuri. What he does and what I do are two very different things, Sashenka, mind if I use your first name?" He sat upon the futon, tossing the folder aside, and kicked back with a grunt. Sashenka giggled at that.

"Please call me Sa, it is what everyone calls me," she mirthfully informed him. "You do not act like a doctor, Marcus."

"Thanks, I try hard not to. Doctors are stuffy pricks."

Sashenka smiled again.

No wonder everyone eats out of the palm of her hand, the believe-it-or-not doctor intoned to himself. That smile could turn a person into butter in a heartbeat.

"So, Sa," Marcus quietly began, his voice partially lost in the ruffling of papers, "feel up to talking about your problem? I have a case file a couple inches thick back in my bunk, but honestly, I think I'd rather just chat you up about it."

Sa shifted a little bit in her wheelchair. "Okay. What do you want to know?"

"Well, I want to tell you what I know, and you tell me if I'm on the money." The doctor tossed his folder back onto the sinfully comfortable couch. "Sashenka Elena Petrova, daughter of Petr Elrich Semenov. You are nineteen years, eleven months, and four days old, and you're here at the Dzugashvili institution because you are afflicted with Duchenne Muscular Dystrophy. How'm I doing, sugar?"

Sa's smile brightened a little bit. "You are doing very well."

"Then let's keep going," Marcus clapped his hands, eyes never leaving hers as he continued. "In the year 2003 you had preemptive surgery to prevent lordosis or scoliosis in your spine. You had metal rods implanted to keep your spine straight, and in 2005 you were relegated to the wheelchair. In March of 2008 you were issued an as-needed breathing machine. In September of last year you were told to use the machine at least eight hours a day. You were offered a medication - Prednisone, a catabolic steroid - to keep your muscles vital shortly after, but... you turned it down. Why?"

"If God wants me, he will take me," Sa confidently replied, "and no medicine will stop Him. Besides, papa says that if I take steroids I can never skate for Russia in the Olympics."

A gloom had settled into Marcus's expression at first. Oh lord, he thought, here is another fatalistic patient to pat on the head. His entire being seemed to brighten at how thrilled he felt to be wrong.

"Skate, as in...?" he asked, intrigued by this. Sa nodded happily.

"Oh yes. When I am cured, I am going to learn to figure skate. I am going to work harder than anyone else, until I can glide along the ice like no one who has ever come before me. And what is more, I will work so hard that every other skater is ashamed of how her butt looks in a leotard compared to mine."

Conversation ricocheted back and forth between the bubbly patient and the relieved doctor for the better part of a half hour before their ultimate purpose even purported to rear its filthy head. Marcus, like most everyone whose presence Sa had graced since her arrival, felt a distinct and natural liking for the dark-featured Russian girl with the wheelchair and Czarina's smile. She was the antithesis of the physical therapy patient at large. Bright, cheerful, and filled with an inexplicable vigor, she opposed the hopeless stereotype with such vital fervor that Marcus could scarcely believe that her young life neared its end.

Moreover, the good doctor was not alone in his good fortune, as Sashenka's sense of amazement bloomed like the vibrant petals of springtime irises as well. Having spent time in the company of more doctors than with members of her own family during the course of her short life, she had long since formed the opinion that the doctors, while noble bearers of good intentions, were nothing more than a sect of socially elevated businesspersons. Never before had she come into contact with a medical professional whose personal pride failed to supercede her own needs, or the concerns of her dear father, and this Marcus Beckett did so with gusto.

"Xenotherapy," began the doctor once the flow of casual conversation snagged, "is a relatively new science that, until recently, primarily entailed the transplanting of animal parts into human beings.“

Sa made a face.

“Yeah, I know. Don’t worry, I don’t plan on putting any pig in you. Now, Pseudoxenotherapy is an extension of that program, and it is what we've developed here at this institution. It's a brand-spanking new, cutting-edge, straight up future-type program that I've been heading up for a few years myself, and we think it might be just the ticket for you, Sa. The details are complex and annoying, so I won't bother you with them, but the short and skinny of it is that we are going to use nanotechnology to build a new Sashenka. A Sashenka without the Duchenne Dystrophy." Marcus fiddled idly with his fingernails as he spoke. "We can even give you that butt you were talking about earlier."

Sa turned this over and over in her mind, considering the possibilities of the situation: the possibility of recovering, the possibility of this final option's failure, and the possibility that this man, Marcus Beckett, was as half-baked as he came across.

"It sounds impossible, what you are telling me right now," Sa lightly decided at last. "It sounds like something from a movie."

Marcus held up a hand, quick to rise with a counter. "It really does, yes. Five years ago, even thinking about the procedure that we have developed here would have gotten even the stuffiest prick doctor to laugh out loud. But... this is 2010, Sashenka. These days technology grows at the speed of imagination. You want a cleaner fuel? Done. How about a janitor robot that can not only distinguish between used and fresh kitty litter, but can also set a broken bone and perform CPR? Done, and done." For emphasis, doctor Beckett snapped his fingers in the air. "Technology on our particular side of the board moves even faster."

Sashenka's eyes softened slightly, dimmed in confusion.

"What do you mean by that, Marcus? Our side of the board?"

"Technically," Marcus paused a bit, grinning a sheepish sort of grin, "the Dzugashvili Institute doesn't exist. We operate outside of international treaties and the control of the European Union and the United Nations for various reasons, and our funding comes from beneath-the-books sources that I can't really talk about. You see, Sashenka, the nanotechnology that our program so heavily employs is forbidden by worldwide accords. But politicians write the law, not scientists, not doctors, and certainly not parents who have to sit and watch their daughters die. And they don't have to see the things that I have to see every single day."

Sashenka bit gently upon her lip. "So that makes you a criminal, Marcus?" she worriedly inquired of him, her misshapen hands idly fingering the armrests of her wheelchair. Marcus Beckett, however, only chortled.

"I guess it does. My crime is saving lives, and by God, I'm guilty. Look... the disease you suffer from cannot be cured through conventional means. Do you happen to know what kind of disease you have, Sashenka?" Marcus edged forward upon the couch with every word, sounding for all the world like a momentum-crazed preacher winding up a sermon. Sashenka's face screwed up, as if unable to comprehend the idiocy of such a statement.

"Yes, Marcus. I have had it for my whole life, so I have had time to study." A wisp of hair fell over her eyes, further cementing her sudden displeasure in her appearance. "It is passed from parent to child."

"Exactly," Marcus nodded, "that's right. A genetic disorder. Now, the human genome was cracked, mapped, documented, and triple-analyzed four million times in the early part of this decade. Medical science flipped onto its ear, with everyone clamoring over the possibilities of genetic tinkering." A certain bitterness made itself known in his voice, one of which Sashenka took a silent note. "Everyone jumped on that train. Wave of the future, they said. By God, we could finally associate traits in humans with individual genes! But no matter how intoxicating this new power was, no genetic therapy ever attempted could isolate the gene responsible for your particular ailment without doing more damage to the subject. It's the same problem we had with chemotherapy before cancer drugs kicked it out the door... in targeting the tumor, live cells were also killed off. In targeting the ruined gene, our techniques could set off a chain of mutations in the subjects that did more damage than the dystrophy itself. Sometimes people could survive that, but..." he gave a barely discernable shrug, "generally... the subjects didn't even make it to age seventeen."

"Is all medicine so depressing, doctor?" Sashenka's eyes, so vibrant and cheerful a moment ago, cast a whirling squall of gloom into Marcus's heart with their abrupt, fearful shift. The doctor sobered into solemnity.

"No," he answered with finality, "not mine. Sa, I don't know what other doctors have told you, but I truly think that I can not only save you, but provide for you a quality of life equal to any healthy person on the planet."

"And what do you get in return for this great service, Marcus?" Sa turned her wheelchair a bit, and wheeled herself towards the flickering television screen. "You are not just doing this for me out of the goodness of your heart. You are a doctor, and I know better than that."

"You are absolutely right, Sa," Marcus nodded, his tone dripping with sarcasm. "You aren't just a patient, you're a statistic. Even more, a landmark statistic... curing a girl of a disease that only rarely strikes females could put Marcus Beckett on the map. I could be famous overnight!" His arms shot comically into the air. "Except," his tone faded towards its normal range, "the Dzugashvili Institute is a black market of medicine. A secret so tightly kept that every single person who comes in here, patient and doctor alike, is forced to sign a nondisclosure agreement. I signed one, your father signed one." His fingers curled up in the classic mime of a handgun, pointing at his own forehead. "Bang. So any fame that might be mine can go no further than these walls, and if it leaves the Carpathian mountains, we're all in a lot of trouble." The doctor allowed a jesting smirk to cross his lips. "We're all fucked in a way that doesn't give us stories to tell our drinking buddies."

Sa silently watched television, her eyes dim beneath the weight of arduous thought. Marcus sat back, letting the heat of the moment flow uninhibited through his pores. Perhaps his words burned a bit too brightly for the situation. He was on the verge of apologizing to the young woman for his candor when she spoke up.

"It is a hard choice," she dismally admitted through tired lips. "But I am not getting younger. I am not afraid that I will die, but I am afraid that I will die without living."

Marcus's heart leapt into his throat.

"I will see you tomorrow, Marcus. You will get your chance to prove that all of what you said is not a pack of lies." With that, Sa turned her full attention to the cat-and-mouse cartoon flickering upon the screen and soundly ignored Marcus Beckett. The good doctor gathered his notes and rose from the couch, softly bidding her goodnight before slipping quietly from the room and clicking shut the wooden door. His meeting with Sashenka Petrova left him with some particularly heavy notions to consider, but the following days would prove to both of them whether her words, or his own, held the most merit.

From Monday morning until late Friday evening, Marcus put the Doppelganger program through its paces while eleven 'traditional' medical personnel conducted the standard motions with Sashenka. The young Russian endured dozens of physical examinations during the course of that week: various scans and blood tests, breath pressure analyses, allergy tests, three concurrent sleep studies, and one narrowly evaded magnetic resonance imagining that saw Johan Schwann physically reprimand one of his peers who refused to cancel the procedure.

Marcus had been sitting in the lab as usual, diligently working on coffee number seven, when the under dramatic scene played out on his wall-mounted monitors. A Frenchman by the name of Sylvain Delacroix, eager to further the groundbreaking work in which his team was involved, had scheduled a nuclear magnetic resonance imaging examination without thoroughly perusing Sashenka's reports. His subordinates, most as eager as he, neglected to perform the research necessary to question his orders. Sylvain's record shone like polished diamonds against the bitter coal of modern medicine and his respect amongst the professionals employed by the Dzugashvili institute stood upon the highest tier; there was simply no reason to second-guess him. Of course, Marcus's docket swelled full enough that he lacked the time to notice the slip-up of another department, and so it was Johan, quiet, shy Johan, who challenged the senior officer on his decision. Sylvain's hubris prevented him from backing down to a Swede, one professional dig led to another, and Marcus found himself watching the world's most graceless boxing match with half a cup of coffee in his hand and two-tenths of a candy bar on his lap.

"She had metal rods implanted in her back," Marcus snapped to Sylvain once he had rushed to the other department to put his foot down, "and you wanted to put her in a plus-sized magnetic box?"

Immediately afterwards, Doctor Beckett convened a meeting of the heads of each department involved with Sashenka's case file. Dressed in painfully uncharacteristic medical whites, he stood silently before the group. Thusly attired, while speaking without his trademark wit and casual nature, Marcus was simply the boss.

"Ladies, gentlemen," he began in a cool tone of voice, "I don't intend to see Drs. Delacroix or Schwann punished for that scuffle in the medical labs earlier. However, I do want to address something. Sashenka Petrova is not a guinea pig, she's not a lost cause, and she is most certainly not a notch on anyone's belt. She's not just another patient, either..." he could see the irritation building on the faces of his peers, "... she's one in every thirty-five hundred boys on the planet, and one in every hundred thousand girls. She's a car crash victim. She has cancer. She is a paraplegic, she's got no legs. She's a war veteran. Am I burying the point far enough in your asses yet? Because I swear to Christ, that if anybody has the idea that her cure is some sort of prize for us, and allows that notion to endanger her or this project, not only will I start a shoe shop in your ass," he paused a moment for effect, gazing over the increasingly unhappy faces in his small crowd, "but I'll see that you end up bottle-feeding old men under an HMO in Siberia until Doomsday! Get me?"

A collective mumble rose from the gathered doctors, but not a word of disagreement offended Marcus's ears. Still, one of the female doctors, a Japanese cardiovascular specialist by the name of Kisako, to whom every last member of the staff referred as Kiki, did speak up after a moment.

"Becket-san, we need as much data on her cardiovascular system as we can get," she explained in her clean, clear English that somehow still managed to blur a few consonant sounds. "Her heart will most certainly be affected by the dystrophy. We need to know how to treat her once the dystrophy is gone."

Marcus held up his hands. "You're all dismissed. Kiki, let's chat for a bit, alright? I have some thoughts on getting around the MRI."

* * *

"It's really amazing, what the Doppelganger can do in test animals. But this MRI nonsense got me thinking... can the heart, the last barrier for the system, just be bypassed?"

"If that was a joke," Kiki muttered with a half-amused expression set upon her lightly age-lined face, "it was a geek joke." Marcus snickered beneath his breath as he keyed open the door to his laboratory-and-bunk-in-one. He liked Kiki, certainly better than the other females present in the installation seemed to, as her dry sense of humor mingled quite well with what he often referred to as his 'slightly moist' brand of the same thing.

"It's a joke after the fact," he assured her. "Have a seat Doctor Ayanami, and let's pretend to be professionals for a minute." Ever the gentleman, Marcus shoved his lab coat and various food wrappers from the seat of the only chair in the lab so that a twittering Kiki could sit. "What can you tell me about Sa's heart without an MRI?"

Kiki shrugged her narrow shoulders. "Anything you want, but it will take more time, and the girl will have to go through more tests. If her comfort and happiness are as important as you make it seem, though..."

Marcus's eyebrow cocked up a notch. "Aren't they?"

"Yes, they are. I am just suggesting that if we want to save her life, we will have to give up her comfort in return." The little doctor, who could not have been an inch over five feet in height, wrung her hands upon her lap. "I am hesitant to see her last days made even more difficult by a battery of tests." Even her smile seemed unsettled, as ever-present as it was.

Marcus sat heavily upon the edge of his desk, his brow knotted in deep thought. Though the next question's identity was as in doubt to either of them as the color of Kiki's hair, still Marcus hesitated in posing it. "You don't think we can save her?"

Kiki pursed her unpainted lips tightly together. "No. Do not misunderstand me Marcus, your program is amazing. But building a body for a human being is so much different from building one for a mouse or a bird..."

"I'll bet you a dinner that we can save her." Doctor Beckett lifted the change bucket from the edge of his desk, one of those novelty items in the shape of a human heart, and set it before Kiki. "If I win, you have to try a plate of biscuits and gravy with me."

Kiki pouted most convincingly. As macabre as it might have seemed, such wagers were commonplace within the Dzugashvili Institution. In a place where sources of entertainment appeared but rarely, such contests could capture attention and supply a bit of focus to an otherwise dull existence. "Okay," Kiki proudly consented. "If I win, you have to try sushi and miso soup." Marcus cringed.

"Blugh, porridge and bait. Okay, you’re on, Keek. I promise, you won't regret this much."

"So, Marcus. How do you plan to fix her without an MRI, and without subjecting her to a hundred more tests? We send the nanomachines into her body to repair the individual clusters of DNA by comparing her data to healthy data, and instructing the nanomachines to even up the differences. But will her heart not still be flawed?" Kiki crossed her legs, clasping her hands at the point of her knees. "Is there something you know that we do not?"

Marcus tapped upon the heart-shaped bucket with a forefinger. "You know that the Doppelganger is a computer program designed to command groups of nanomachines. The idea was to analyze Sashenka's body and compare it to the same analysis of a healthy girl with the same dimensions, blood type, et cetera, and instruct the nanos to build a duplicate Sashenka with the problems replaced by healthy information.”

“Yes, as I just said...”

“But do we really need to just tweak a problematic body for her? Sure, she won’t have the dystrophy any more, but she’ll need extensive physical therapy, probably more surgery on her back, and she’ll live in pain for the rest of her life.” Marcus smiled at Kiki, whose eyes glimmered with the understanding of the pitch to come. “Why not just build her a whole new body? Same blood type, same structure, but a brand new heart, spine... calves that aren’t swelled to grotesque proportions? You know it has as good a chance of working as replicating her current body does.”

Kiki sat in silence for several seconds, considering the words of her superior. “I think you are thinking about her with your feelings, and not your brain, Marcus. Does Victor Frankenstein ring any bells?"

"That's his business."

Kiki just smirked and tapped her foot impatiently.

"Victor Frankenstein was a character made up years before the answering machine, Kiki, let alone the nanomachine. Technology has changed. Come on.” Marcus actually knelt upon the frigid tile of his laboratory floor, hands clasped in the classic pleading stance before her. “You’ve seen the Doppelganger work that way. I've been able to construct entire bodies in a few days for test animals by feeding the nanomachines the proper instructions. You know I wouldn’t jeopardize her life if I didn’t think she had a good shot of coming out of it on top, Dr. Ayanami...”

Her eyes softened in sympathy. Kisako understood that Marcus Beckett’s words remained true to his heart no matter the situation, and somehow, his candor moved her. So what if his idea constituted human cloning and would cost a ridiculous sum of money? The price of the Doppleganger project already ran into the millions in Euros. What would another couple of thousand matter?

“Ayanami-sama, I’m begging you,” he added in near desperation, attaching the Japanese honorific suffix to her name to add weight to his words. “Help me, and we can save Sa together..”

Kiki extended her hand to blanket his, a maternal turn setting her lips at angles. “Okay, Marcus,” she pleasantly affirmed, “just tell me what to do.”

“First," Marcus grinned a fool's grin, "you’ll need to give Dr. Beckett a kiss.”

“How about a right hook?”

“Fair enough.”

Days and weeks intermingled freely for the scientists of the Dzugashvili Institute. Marcus’s impromptu speech hovered over their heads like a veil of uncertainty, motivating some, disgruntling others, until the telltale signs of emerging factions began to display their irksome faces. He pushed harder during those few weeks than ever before, reminding them at every turn of the woman whose life hung in the balance, moving freely between departments to spread his particular brand of motivation, and earning the ire of every man and woman with a PhD attached to hir name.

In truth, were it not for the deteriorating condition of Sashenka, Marcus would have most certainly demanded shifts working around the clock. Within weeks of arriving at the Institute, Johan’s early predictions rang eerily true. At the end of a month Sashenka’s faithful wheelchair reached its retirement, and the young woman was at last condemned to a bed. Kiki and her crew performed phenomenally in extending the vitality of Sa’s failing heart, beyond the expectations of anyone who had yet cared to risk a wager upon the subject. Perhaps even more importantly, Sylvain Delacroix fed off the flames of doctors Becket and Ayanami’s successes to drive his respiratory team into astronomical form. Sashenka’s lungs, while naturally unable to recover, maintained a static line of health that garnered words of praise from every member of the other teams. Even Johan, whose respect for Doctor Delacroix had plummeted after their scuffle, extended lukewarm congratulations.

In light of these monumental successes, Marcus Beckett stepped down from active duty as medical supervisor to pour himself completely into the delicate stages of the Doppelganger project. Though his official title remained so as not to throw the other departments into an inevitable race for his job, Marcus leaned more and more heavily upon Kisako Ayanami’s shoulders with each passing day. The added freedom would allow him to endeavor in a passable attempt to better Sashenka’s quality of life and, in so doing, allow him to remove the weight of having not done so from his own shoulders.

Kiki refused to buckle beneath the added weight of supervising her peers. She moved and spoke with a surgical edge to her attractive voice, intent upon inspiring the caliber of performance and accomplishment Marcus Beckett had. Kisako pushed herself just as hard as anyone else, harder still when one considered her duties as head of the cardiovascular department. Eighteen to twenty hour days filled her weeks until the lines beneath her eyes flourished into shadowy circles and the cutting edge of her voice dulled to a soft whisper or blunted mumble. Johan bore what he could of her load, and even allowed an intern from his neuroscience department to transfer and work directly beneath Kisako to that effect. Without the proper forms and paperwork the move held no legal weight, but by then, not a soul in the program cared. The system was unraveling at their feet; it was but a matter of time before the entire Institute would crumble into bits.

The strangest aspect of this was that, aside from the money men whose job description contained the words ‘keep the sponsors happy’, not one person seemed to care. Sashenka’s battle with the forces of Death had captured their minds while her bubbly smile enslaved their hearts. Though a mighty force on their own, those traits, when combined with Marcus Beckett’s endless enthusiasm and Kisako Ayanami’s strength, became the genuine stuff of dreams.

Tension gave swift rise to confrontations with ever greater frequency over the course of June. Mutinous doctors glared at him as he walked to the lavatory. Medical technicians turned their backs when he entered a room, and more than one angry memo could always be found languishing in his inbox at any given time. One creative neurological specialist even made an Institution-wide event of pointing out the apparent promiscuity of Marcus's mother via a metaphor involving a flock of geese. Though the remark targeted him, Marcus still gave that fellow points for creativity.

Marcus knew that his subordinates had long since passed their thresholds of exhaustion both physical and mental, but after every session with Sashenka his care for their opinions dwindled a bit further. Burdened by the unsavory weight of her very fate, Marcus Beckett could not have stood more firmly by his actions. More than one occasion saw the normally easygoing doctor getting into the face of an insubordinate peer, or resolving a minor difficulty through power of position instead of discussion. For Sashenka's sake, he knew that he had no time for the politics of kindness.

“How are we doing today Sa?” he inquired of his complacent patient one tepid July morning, a day so bereft of morale amongst the scientists that even Kiki, normally his most ardent supporter, had served him a cold shoulder at the breakfast table.

Sashenka gazed upon him from her fluffy white pillow, the dark orbs of her eyes dimming at last beneath the weight of her failing health. Lying upon that gurney she seemed so fragile compared to the sight of her wheeling about in her chair weeks before, like a runt in a litter of kittens trying desperately to keep pace with the play of its siblings. The sight troubled Marcus beyond description.

“I am dying,” she whispered through her ventilator mask, “or so I am told. What is under the cloth?”

Marcus turned his head, glancing at a cloth-covered table attached to several dozen wall-mounted devices: heart monitors, ventilators, an external pacemaker, and so forth. His Cheshire cat smile returned, lighting up the observant chestnuts of his eyes.

“That is why I have brought you here today, Sa.” He laid a hand upon the plaid sheet, fingertips teasing its frayed edges. “Sashenka Elena Petrova, I present to you, Sashenka Elena Petrova Mark Two!” With a flourish doctor Beckett whipped back the sheet, revealing a faceless, lifeless female form beneath. "We call her Minka. Johan got to name her; he drew the short straw. It's a temporary name." Gray of flesh and white of hair, it more closely resembled the cadaver of an asphyxiation victim than a living woman. Sashenka squeaked softly at the sight of such a macabre thing.

“But Marcus, she has no face! And... she is a little scary,” shyly admitted the ailing Russian.

“Well, we have to see how well the teams did in collecting your data. If it turns out that you’re compatible with her, as I think you will be, we can begin the process of putting 'you' into 'her'.” Marcus patted the shoulder of the cadaverous form, earning a look of disgust from Sashenka. “And don’t worry about her face. If you and she get along, I'll call the plastic surgeon I have standing by. She's going to recreate your face according to a computer simulation of what it would look like had you not been afflicted with Duchenne Dystrophy. Doctor Elsa Browning, she’s fantastic. Not a bad surgeon, either.”

The doctor let his stream of babble pool into silence. Sashenka gazed mournfully upon the form before her, the slim, well-defined body that stood to be her own. Something sorrowful warped her soft, plain features into an expression simply singing out to be captured upon a canvas. In a single moment Sa seemed to him as a pathetic wretch bolstered by infinite optimism, weighed down by fate, and held aloft upon a kite string of hope. The sight sobered and grieved him in the same instant.

"Is she dead?" asked the terminal girl, seconds after the passing of that surreal moment. Marcus glanced upon the ashen flesh and empty stare of the new body, pondering that very question to himself, but when he faced Sa again it was with a broad, willful smile.

"She was never alive, Sa. This homunculus is the fruit of our entire institution's labor for the last few years. A body created by and from the nanomachines under instruction of the Doppelganger program. She doesn't have a heart yet, or a brain, but she has everything else, and as soon as you're ready we'll start the localization process.”

Sashenka slipped the ventilator mask back upon her face, turning her eyes away from the artificial being beside her. “When I live in this new body, will I be the same as I am now?”

“Of course not,” Marcus confidently replied, “you will be healthy.”

“No,” Sa lifted a hand, waving that answer off. “I mean, will my mind be the same. Will I have my memories, my personality? Will I still think you are not an ugly man, or will I find you repulsive?”

Marcus could not help but grin at the dig. “I hope you come out of it thinking I’m an Adonis. But I’m betting that your mind will be exactly the same as it was.”

“Alright,” agreed Sashenka dismally, “I trust you, Marcus.”

He wondered, somewhere in the bowels of his mind, why that simple sentence seemed to stab him so deeply inside.

“That’s the last of the connectors. Sa, are you comfortable?”

Sashenka Petrova was, in that moment, the tangle of wires protruding behind the household computer. Electrical impulse detection pads attached like suction cups to the young woman's flesh in no less than fifty places, their thin wires spanning the short distance to the lifeless Doppelganger in a spider web of copper, rubber, and cloth.

"I feel like a puppet on strings," was Sashenka's brusque observation. "I am getting tired of all these tests, Marcus. I have not had a waking hour to myself in days."

"Everyone is getting tired," the doctor assured her, his hands busily manipulating the various buttons, switches, and dials set about the room. "It won't be much longer, Sashenka. I promise."

"Neither will I, Marcus."

Marcus's weary hand froze upon the last of the egg timer-like dials. He could swear he felt his heart sinking into his stomach. For weeks Sashenka's good humor held steadfast, her smile glowing as prettily one day as the next. As the temperance of July faded into passionate August that smile vanished as if it had never been. Sashenka often articulated a sort of resigned expectation concerning her mortality, either through subtle humor or blunt self-demoralization.

The doctor turned from his switches and screens, avoiding the Russian's eyes. "You'll feel a tingle at first. And then, just like we practiced, I want you to think about moving your right hand. And then move it. Okay?" Before she could answer the machines whirred to life, their gentle hum distracting both from the task at hand.

Sashenka let her eyelids slide down, exhaled firmly. Marcus carefully observed the knit of her brow, the pursing of her pale lips; incontrovertible signs of intense concentration. With a deft hand he recorded these reactions upon his laptop computer, and was so preoccupied with typing that only his peripheral vision caught the lifting of Minka's fingers.

His laptop beeped, snapping him out of his sudden stasis. He looked to the screen, rereading the last section of his notes to catch himself.

Patient shows a great deal of reluctant enthusiasm for the project, as if her will to continue has just abbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbb

His finger had lain upon the 'b' key for long enough to irk the machine into beeping. As he looked amazedly on the hand began to twitch, the arm following shortly thereafter.

"Sashenka... you're moving her!"

"That's wonderful."

For the second time in two minutes, Marcus stared aghast.

Minka's lips still lay partially open after speaking - speaking clearly - the same words as had the Russian herself.

"Are you proud of me?" she gamely inquired through both sets of lips.

"I have never been more proud of anyone in my entire life, Sashenka." The doctor frantically mashed the keys of his laptop, recording, documenting, praying that each and every meter and scale and graph functioned properly that day. He could not wait to tell Kisako and the rest of his team leaders the good news.

"Can you imagine? In a few minutes she could already speak through Minka! I could not believe my ears, Kiki, it was incredible! Just imagine what she could do with a few more weeks of therapy..."

"Weeks?" Doctor Ayanami practically spat the word into her colleague's face. "We have been working nonstop for months! This was supposed to be finished already, Marcus, how can you ask for more weeks from us?"

Marcus glanced nervously about, irritated by the faces of their subordinates turning quickly away. Until now, no one had gotten in Doctor Beckett's face about anything. Most of them would love to, but lacked the courage or feared for their jobs. Strong-willed and, most importantly, tenured, Kisako Ayanami possessed neither of those traits.

"Let's talk somewhere private, Kiki..."

"Do not Kiki me, Marcus!" A few people sported broad grins. Suddenly Kisako was the gallant hero, facing down the corporate bully for all of their sakes. This bizarre reaction bit a little further into Marcus's pleasant day. "We all need a day off. And if you do not give it to us, then we cannot work for you any more."

"Okay, I'll give you all a day off." Marcus nodded, guiltily enjoying the confusion spreading into Kisako's sharp Asian features. "That's twenty-four more hours of Sashenka's life, wasted. You want to sleep in so she can die? Fine. I won't."

"Marcus, that is not how it is..."

"Don't Marcus me." He threw up his hands in disgust. "Do whatever you want. You all have plenty of days to screw around after this project is over. Sashenka doesn't. If it goes wrong, her days are done. Either way your lives go on. I'll be in the lab. Fucking ingrates."

The amused and delighted smiles faded from the faces of those present. Doctor Beckett left a trail of slammed doors in his wake. Kisako's cheeks retained their furious, hurt blush until long after she cocooned herself within her office to think. In the end, Marcus's outburst had a semblance of the desired effect... most researchers went back to work without complaint, Kisako included. It would prove to be the last time such a method functioned effectively within those walls.

"We are getting so close now that it isn't even amusing. Three more days, Sa, and we'll be able to perform the transplant of your brain."

Sashenka only sighed in response. Six days of rigorous testing with Minka had left both her and the good doctor exhausted wrecks. The walls blended together, the sights, the scents of the Institute blurred into one uninspiring gray. Time lacked meaning to the two of them, with no real hope of change upon the horizon.

"Marcus, I have to tell you something," wheezed Sashenka, her voice obscured once more by her now ever-present ventilation mask. "I think my time is almost here. I feel it..." another wheezing breath, "... in my heart."

The doctor put away his notebook. "You have to stay positive, Sa. We've fought a hell of a fight together, and I don't know about you, but I'm not prepared to lose it."

"My fight has been my whole life." As Marcus stood over the ailing woman, he could not help but avert his eyes. To see tears upon that face physically hurt him; to know that her courage had finally deserted her stained his soul black.

"I would give anything to help you, Sa..." he admitted against his better judgment, "... and I think I can. But, in case I was wrong, please tell me what I can do to make you feel better right now." His words formed slowly upon his tongue, as his conscious mind had little to do with anything at that time. Sashenka reacted as if she could sense this, with a softening of her dim eyes and a slight upturn of her lips.

"There is so much I never managed to do. Sing. Dance. Go to school. Fall in love." The Russian reached up, grasping weakly at his arm. "I never was able to kiss a boy, either."

Marcus's features softened even further. "Sa... you have to-"

"Stay positive. Yes. I know." Her eyes settled upon his. "But it is my dying wish. To show my appreciation for your hard work, Marcus. I want to fall in love, I do, but to ask that of you would not be fair to either of us." Silence threaded the hollow of her voice once again. "I ask only for a kiss, Doctor."

"Sa..."

"I do not have time to debate, Marcus."

Years later, Doctor Beckett could not have told a person just why he did what he did that day. It flew in the face of every medical rule in the book, every ethical consideration known to the practice. Reluctantly he slipped the mask from Sashenka's pallid face, his eyes tearing up at the hopeful smile facing up at him. Though she fought to conceal it, still her straining breaths sounded plainly through her chest. Whatever happened afterwards, in his heart Marcus knew that this was the right thing to do. For Sashenka. Perhaps for himself, as well.

"What else do you want me to? I can medicate her until she's seeing pink antelope in her bed but it isn't going to save her, Marcus. Any day now she's going to fall asleep and never wake back up. It has been inevitable from day one and you know it."

Marcus's glare bored gullies into the face of Sylvain Delacroix. For two days sleep had avoided doctor Beckett as surely as had his friends and coworkers while the physical and emotional strain of the entire situation ground him into a shriveling husk of the brilliant mind of yesteryear. Age showed plainly in his previously vibrant features. Laughing lines dominated the weary coarseness of his skin. For those same two days, Marcus felt as though his face was not his own but, rather, a mask cast against his soul. A Marcus mask, waving his weakness and vulnerability proudly on display for all to see. As Sashenka slowly died, so did he.

"But she's come so far, Sylvain, she's so close," pled the nearly mad doctor, "she can move Minka. She can speak through Minka's lips, she can feel Minka's pain..."

The slam of Sylvain's open hand against a cafeteria tabletop cut into Marcus's monologue with authority. "Doctor Beckett, are you familiar with the term 'professional distance'?" he snappishly demanded, the crimson tinge to his face brightening with every syllable.

"You go to hell, Delacroix. Go to hell and take your professional distance with you!" By then more than one wandering food-seeker had been drawn to the emerging shouting match. Marcus cared nothing for their presence or for their opinions. Or for Sylvain Delacroix, really. Today his word was displacement; by venting his frustrations upon an innocent Sylvain, Marcus could put aside his apprehension and anxiety over Sashenka's impending bout with destiny.

"Marcus," the soft voice of Johan rebutted in a stark contrast to the roaring going on at that table, "no one wants to see her lose her life. But you knew going into this that Sashenka was living on borrowed time, you just didn't want to face it." A few others nodded or voiced their agreement, though this hardly seemed to please the neurological specialist.

Marcus's wrath turned its attention to Johan in a single pulse of the heart. "What in the world are you talking about, I didn't want to face it?"

"It started out with pride for the program, for the Doppelganger. Your baby. But then what? You became so enamored with your own power that you promised Sashenka the impossible and were confident you could deliver. You leaned even more heavily upon everyone else to devote your time to making promises to that girl, but the more we worked, the more you wanted." The Swede's cool ceruleans settled upon Marcus as his words tread the still waters of silence. No one dared make a sound for fear of snapping the delicate balance of tension in the air.

"Then her health deteriorated. It was a downward spiral, Marcus, and you knew it. Knew it, but couldn't prepare yourself for it. You knew that the Doppelganger wasn't ready, and that Sashenka wouldn't be ready, but you just couldn't let that girl's hopes be dashed at zero hour. God damn you to the pits of hell, Marcus Beckett, but your actions were nothing but noble." Johan shook his head sadly, eyes glittering with emotion he feared to allow existence. Even Marcus, sleep-deprived, militant Marcus, wilted beneath the exhaustion and anguish in those eyes. "But it doesn't work this way. You bought her love with our sweat because you couldn't do it on your own."

"Love," Marcus muttered in astonishment, "is that what you think this is about? You people think I fell in love with a patient?"

"Didn't you?" Delacroix put in. "Didn't you? We've seen the security tapes, Marcus. We know the hours you've spent with her, and we all saw you kiss her. Can you deny these things?"

"No, but you don't understand, all of you, just listen...!"
"No, Marcus." At a woman's voice the attention in the cafeteria shifted noticeably. Kisako, clad in clean whites for the first time in a week, stood upon a chair so that she might be seen and heard, the specter of a very beautiful woman hidden behind the weary mask upon her face. "No. I should have known the day of Johan and Sylvain's fight that you were not thinking with your head. You were playing savior while the rest of us were playing angels...

"Kiki, please listen..."

"No. The time for listening to your semantics is over, Marcus. It is all over." Kisako Ayanami's little hand slid into the front pocket of her laboratory whites, the noise masked beneath a chorus of incredulous interrogations. She produced from within her pocket a folded scrap of paper, which she opened to the tune of a soft crinkling rumple and nothing more. "Sashenka Elena Petrova was pronounced dead at six forty-two o' clock this morning by Doctor Kisako Ayanami, confirmed... by... Doctor Murray Rood... Effective immediately, Doctor Marcus Beckett is forbidden from the grounds of the Dzugashvili institute.“ A pause. “He is to be transferred to Sarah Mason Hospital in Pueblo, Colorado. I am so sorry, Marcus..."

Kisako lifted her eyes, sparkling wet with tears, valiantly held at bay until those last few words struggled to find purchase upon her tongue. Two others wept openly. Some swore, others sat in silence. Amongst the latter were Sylvain Delacroix and Marcus Beckett. Before the solemnity of the moment their antagonism fled, leaving a void between them; empty, to be filled only by the dank waters of self-reproach.

"Here we were, arguing about her fate..." Sylvain quietly began, his voice trailing off for a long moment. To his lips he raised a silver cross hung upon his neck. "Rest well, ma dame Petrova. You've left this world behind none too soon."

Marcus felt the muscles beneath his eyes twitching. "I am going to my lab," he announced in a startlingly clear tone of voice, "to pack."

He exited the cafeteria without garnering a great deal of attention, which suited him succinctly. After all of that blustering, all of his promises, the only thing he had managed to provide for Sashenka was a troublesome two months away from her family and home, and Marcus wanted no part of their ire or their condolences. Not today.

A brief sojourn across grounds of the Dzugashvili Institution greeted him with the same blank faces and cold shoulders of every other day, a sight which he welcomed and enjoyed. Apparently the news of Sashenka's passing had not spread to the corners of the Institution; so much the better, as far as Doctor Beckett could tell.

Within the doors of the Doppelganger lab, Marcus received confirmation of the unfortunate news. A crew of techs worked silently within, directed by Doctor Murray Rood, a dermatologist with whom Marcus was only vaguely familiar. Theirs was a somber duty -- to catalogue the data of the poor girl's final moments. The body, of course, had been removed prior to Marcus's arrival for his own sake.

"If it's any consolation at all, she felt no pain," Doctor Rood explained to the still-distraught Marcus Beckett, "slipped away quietly in her sleep. She's better off."

"Yeah," dejectedly admitted Marcus, "you're probably right. I won't get in your way, I just came to pick up my briefcase."

"Not a problem, doctor. Though, you can help us out..." Rood jerked his thumb towards Minka, whose nudity lay covered beneath the same sheet originally employed to hide her from Sashenka. The plastic surgeon had been and gone. Minka looked almost exactly like he had pictured Sashenka would have, had she known good health. "What shall we do with her?"

Marcus hefted his light black briefcase from beneath his desk, not even looking back. "Keep her here. She'll make a great autopsy later."

Chapter 9: The Unbiased Judge

Sunset descended over the dull, rounded crests of the Rodna mountains in typical Romanian fashion; violently, and without any particular sense of order. Marcus Beckett gazed upon the fading beacon of light, the source of all Earth's life, as it sank beneath the stones and cast the sky in hues of hateful violet and failing orange.

"You sit so pretty, up there on your pedestal," he grumbled to the sinking star, "sending out your light. You think that by doing what you do, you're helping." With a flick of his thumbs he popped loose the simple clasps of his briefcase, and a turn of his wrist keyed open the basic, factory-inlaid lock. "But you aren't. Things beneath you go unnoticed. You think on such a grand scale that the little details just get away from you."

Marcus pushed open the lid of his case, gazing down upon the silver device nestled comfortably within. In eleven years he had never thought to employ its elementary power, though he had kept it just in case. Patients like Sashenka - the terminally, agonizingly ill - could benefit greatly from the singular might stored within that smallish tube.

Not a soul in the place would have imagined it would end like this. Not for him. Not a man of his charisma, his brilliance. But when time slowed to a crawl, when the imperceptible moments between laughter and tears had melded together, his vulnerability made its irrational presence known to all. Sashenka's death simply tied it all into a neat, hellish package. It had ensured his decision. The breeze blowing through his hair would be the final testament of this failure.

"You and I aren't so different," he said once more to the sun. "Between us, though... I suppose I became obsolete first. Promise me that... you'll greet Kisako for me everyday, alright? She won't misunderstand you as she has me."

Marcus pressed the shining, silver tube between his teeth. It felt cold, colder perhaps than anything his sheltered life had allowed him to know, but he welcomed that sensation. His thumbs found the trigger without ado. A soft prayer for the sanctity of his soul rose within his mind. He had never envisioned himself departing this life in Romania. But life, he laughed as he recalled, was full of surprises. Sashenka's death could not be blamed upon him, but at that moment in time Marcus Beckett craved judgment.

Six chambers.
One bullet.

He would cast his fate to the unbiased will of the forty-five.

"What were you doing out there all by yourself, anyway?"

Something in the softness of Kisako's voice irritated Marcus to no end. Though much of the previous hour blurred in his memory like overexposed film, her combative words over the course of the last week remained unmarred.

"I was about to take some medicine," he coldly answered. Briefcase and desktop collided as Marcus carelessly tossed the black box onto Kiki's work station to the tune of a startled squeak from its owner. "Kind of a miracle cure."

Taking the hint, Doctor Ayanami flipped the stainless steel clasps and popped the briefcase open. She stared emptily at its contents for a long moment before pushing down the felt-lined lid. Her gaze settled upon its lustrous finish, never rising to meet the eyes of her former boss.

"I did not know this project meant so much to you, Marcus..."

"Dammit Kiki, it wasn't just the project. Don't you get it? It was that girl's life, and the fact is that I ruined the last months of it. Then I lost my job. My respect. And, oh yeah, the woman I love thinks I undercut her because I was in love with a dying Russian girl whose name I could barely pronounce." Marcus turned to Kiki's door to avoid her confused expression, laid his hand upon the knob. Guilt swept across him like flowing water behind the tidal wave of his diatribe, but nothing could take those words back now. "But you didn't know that last part, Kiki, did you?"

Without a sound the door swung open, allowing Marcus Beckett to step through. Kiki would have let him go without a word. Those scant seconds could not provide the time she would need to craft a solid answer; however, for better or worse, Marcus simply could not bring himself to leave her office that way. He stood there, feeling idiotic, until Kisako's brain at last snapped into function.

"You did not lose your job, Marcus," she submissively informed him, "not really."

"Come again?" The xenotherapist glanced back over his shoulder, wilting at the sorrowful glaze over Kiki's dark eyes. "It was a unanimous decision. All the heads of the departments voted to oust me, Kiki. You told me so yourself."

"I re-hired you," Kisako snapped, turning her eyes away from him.

"When?"

"Just now."

A certain irrational sense of betrayal flooded the mind of Marcus Beckett, just for a second. A slight shift of his body turned him so that he faced his apparent superior, though his manner hardly carried the scent of gratitude.

"Why, Kisako? Why hire me back after I ruined everything," Marcus hissed. "After I was such an ass to you? Without the patient, there's no need for a pseudoxenotherapist." Kisako held her gaze in place, refusing to look away from that accursed briefcase.

"There is a problem with Minka," she slowly intoned, "no one will know more about it than you."

Marcus's eyebrow lifted a smidge. "Problem with... Minka? Kiki, we don't need that thing anymore, if it's stinking, just toss it down the garbage chute."

"That is not it, Beckett-san.” Kiki rose from her desk, her eyes still damp and soft with restrained emotion. “This is something you must come and see. When we get there, then you can decide if you still want to work with me.” A pause. “If you still want to love me.”

Marcus could have cried. He didn’t, but that does not mean the urge was absent.

Chapter 10: A Spark in the Rain

“What else could go wrong today?”

These words arrived upon the edge of Marcus's tongue before even the slightest scrap of conscious intimation could register within his mind. The Doppelganger's lab had been sealed off, its single gate of solid steel lowered into place and its independent ventilation ducts rerouted to form a tight airlock. Only through a thick pane of bulletproof plexiglass could the innards of the laboratory be seen. It was through this copious piece of plastic that the gathered heads of every department in the Dzugashvili institution stared when Marcus Beckett arrived. Knowing nothing of what to expect Marcus had built up no less than three fantasies as to what Kisako Ayanami might have been referring in her little office, but none of them contained the imagination necessary to produce the fairy tale he was about to encounter upon the other side.

“HAZMAT suits ready?” asked the pseudoxenotherapist of his compatriots, and they each nodded stiffly, dressed as they were in the unyielding gray of their disease-resistant space suits. “Open the airlock, Dr. Rood.”

With a hiss of escaping gas and the grinding of metal against metal the steel door roared open, and Marcus stepped inside. The very first aspect of the room of which he became aware was a familiar, rhythmic beeping emanating from somewhere along the next wall. The laboratory lay bare and well-organized for the most part; Murray Rood and his containment team had done a sparkling job of resetting the place after Sashenka’s passing, and for this Marcus would owe his eternal gratitude. Knowing where everything should be benefited him greatly as he would not have to worry himself with any articles that might have been out of place.

Sixteen of the twenty monitors upon the wall showed nothing more than a reflective green screen. Three of the remaining four contained useless data like the room temperature, humidity, and atmospheric pressure. One, however, caught Marcus’s attention as he stepped closer to the bedside of the artificial Minka. His gaze fell over the screen as he stood next to the puppet body lying upon the table.

The beeping originated from a lone electrocardiogram machine.

Marcus glanced down to see a single set of wires running from the table to the equipment set into the laboratory wall, proving that it was indeed the EKG equipment that remained functional. He turned to the glass to ask who had plugged the thing back up, but his breath froze in his throat as he looked across the Doppelganger’s table.

His brain refused to believe the sight before him.

Minka was staring at him. Her lips, once ashen gray and now a strong shade of dark pink, parted before his astonished eyes.

“Marcus,” she purred in a slightly Russian accent, “I’m cold. Bring me a blanket.”

The circle of life is a well-documented beast. It is common knowledge that, from the movement of life, there originates death; conversely, from the ruins of death, there will always grow life.